More than 118,000 people around the world have received cochlear implants (CIs). Since the introduction of CIs in 1984, their performance in terms of speech intelligibility has considerably improved. However, their performance in noisy environments still remains a challenge. The speech understanding rate by CI patients is reported to be high in quiet environments but is shown to greatly diminish in noisy environments. Several speech enhancement algorithms, are proposed in the literature to address the performance aspect in noisy environments. However, no strategy has been offered in the literature to automatically tune these algorithms in order to obtain improved performance across different kinds of background noise environments encountered in daily lives of CI patients.
Enhancement or noise suppression algorithms are known in the prior art which provide improved performance for a number of noisy environments. The claimed invention is directed to an automatic mechanism to identify the noise environment and tune or adjust the noise suppression component to different noisy environments in a computationally efficient or real-time manner. The motivation here has been to improve performance of CIs by allowing them to automatically adapt to different noisy environments. The real-time requirement is the key aspect of the developed solution as any computationally intensive approach is not practically useable noting that the processors that are often used in CIs are of limited computational power.
More specifically, a real-time CI system is developed herein which automatically classifies 10 commonly encountered noisy environments in order to switch among the noise suppression parameters that are optimized for these environments. The classification is done in such a way that little additional computation burden is added to the CI speech processing pipeline. Depending on the outcome of the noise classification, the system automatically and on-the-fly switches to those parameters which provide optimum performance for that particular noisy environment. Although the claimed invention is discussed with respect to cochlear implants, it should be noted that the invention has applicability in a variety of hearing devices including hearing aids and Bluetooth devices.